The technical excellence road has a lot of dead ends and false prophets. Be aware!
I know that "PHP" is a dirty word, hereabouts, but I submit Exhibit A, the "fishtank graph": https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
There are some really big, well-written (and badly-written) systems out there, in PHP, and it's a great place to learn about some of the baseline technologies that any aggregate Internet system will use.
But I have never liked the language, myself, despite having developed some fair proficiency in it. These days, I like doing really nice frontend work, in native Swift. PHP is what I use to create backends. It works fine.
I'd definitely agree with Rails. IMHO it has been defining Web development for a long time. Even today patterns from Rails like are copied outside of the Rails context. Service Objects seem to be a recent example.
Hotwire seems definitely cool tech but after having been exposed to Ruby on Rails it's possible to go into various directions. (Classical server-side rendering, Hotwire or e.g. React-based SPAs)